My 60-minute lecture from Autodesk University 2014. This session explores several 3ds Max software workflows throughout the production pipeline that accommodate fast turnaround for new, part-time, and casual users - as well as for seasoned veterans who want to create beautiful static images or animations without an in-depth “guru” knowledge of 3ds Max software.

This series of tips and tricks videos are designed to jump right in and quickly show a particular feature or workflow within Autodesk 3ds Max. This list will continue to grow, so please come back often and let me know what you think!

This is from the Autodesk Masterclass series for SigGraph 2009.
Originally posted on the AREA website for the masterclasses, for some reason it got cut off in the fourth video so this is a re-posting of the entire presentation. Since the time of this recording, there have also been more features added to 3ds Max for non-photorealistic rendering. Most notably are the Nitrous Stylized Viewport options available to the Quicksilver GPU rendering engine.

This is a "living document" that will continue to grow - so please check back from time to time. This is an un-official listing of lots of FREE tools that are out there in the community for 3ds Max. This is obviously a partial listing and the focus here is not things like texture map or model libraries, but, rather, tools that run within 3ds Max that help workflows and pipelines along.

[Now current to 3ds Max 2016] // This document is not official Autodesk marketing or tech documentation. The original idea was to provide myself and others a means of quick access to feature-highlights for various releases of Autodesk 3ds Max going back to version 2008. This is NOT a full, comprehensive list of everything from any particular release, but simply a list of what I feel are “Significant 3ds Max Features by Release”. Thanks to Rodrigo for the initial layout!

Now that Autodesk Composite is FREE, I thought I would take a moment to show users the proper way to set up the disk-based caching for the best performance possible. In this example, I forego using a SSD or RAID0 in favor of a Fusion ioFX card for caching and playback.

In this short video, I step way out of my typical comfort zone to share an interesting tip and trick for the TD’s and scripting gang out there. Sublime Text is a popular text-editor that accommodates lots of favored workflows in the industry. This quick video shows how to add support to it for MaxScript. The result is the ability to open, edit and execute MaxScripts from Sublime, which also has support for Python (as does 3ds Max 2015).

In this short video, I take a look at how to use the one-click interop between 3ds Max 2015 and Mudbox 2015. Specific area of interst are two options for sending Mudbox sculpt layers to 3ds Max as Morpher modifier targets and secondly, sending Mudbox paint layers to 3ds Max as non-destructive, Composite maps for subsequent material editing.